Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution

S  T  O  N  E  W  A  L  L

D  A  V  I  D

C  A  R  T  E  R

S T.   MARTIN’S   G R I F F I N       N E W   Y O R K

STONEWALL.

Copyright © 2004 by David Carter.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without written permission except in the case of brief quotations

embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address

St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue,

New York, N.Y.

10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carter, David.

Stonewall: the riots that sparked the gay revolution / by David Carter.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 311) and index (p. 323).

ISBN 0-312-20025-0 (hc)

ISBN 0-312-34269-1 (pbk)

EAN 978-0312-34269-2

1. Homosexuality. 2. Lesbianism. 3. Gay liberation movement—United States. I. Title.

HQ76.C3155 2004

 306.76’6’0973—dc22

2004040226

First St. Martin’s Griffin Edition: June 2005

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To the gay street youth

who fought and bled at Stonewall

I have no doubt we shall win,

but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms.

—OSCAR WILDE,

LETTER TO GEORGE IVES

C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

Prologue

SETTING THE STAGE

1. Greenwich Village, USA

2. Oppression, Resistance, and Everyday Life

3. On the Street

4. The Stonewall Inn

5. The Skull

6. Dawn Is Just Breaking

THE STONEWALL RIOTS

7. A Friday Night Out

8. We’re Taking the Place!

9. Lancing the Festering Wound of Anger

10. Christopher Street Belongs to the Queens!

11. They’ve Lost That Wounded Look

GAY LIBERATION

12. Seizing the Moment

13. We’re the Gay Liberation Front!

14. The Heroic Age

Conclusions

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Oral Histories

Credits for the Photographs

Index

Prologue

The Stonewall Riots were a series of violent protests and street demonstrations that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, and centered around a gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. These riots are widely credited with being the motivating force in the transformation of the gay political movement. Everything else about these riots—how they started and who was responsible; who were the patrons of the Stonewall Inn; who were the owners; what happened at the riots; who was there and who was not; and pretty much everything else revolving around these riots—has been a bone of contention between various individuals and interest groups within and without the gay world. This book attempts to bring together everything that is known about the Stonewall Inn, the riots themselves, and the life and times of the people involved (gay men, lesbians, transvestites, and others) to present the clearest possible picture of what happened and why.

It was only a few decades ago—a very short time in historical terms—that the situation of gay men and lesbians was radically different from what it is today. At the end of the 1960s, homosexual sex was illegal in every state but Illinois.¹ Not one law—federal, state, or local—protected gay men or women from being fired or denied housing. There were no openly gay politicians. No television show had any identifiably gay characters. When Hollywood made a film with a major homosexual character, the character was either killed or killed himself. There were no openly gay policemen, public school teachers, doctors, or lawyers. And no political party had a gay caucus.

It is common today to trace the tremendous gains made for lesbian and gay rights since the early 1970s back to the Stonewall Riots of 1969, when gay men, transvestites, and lesbians fought the police during a routine raid on a popular gay club in Greenwich Village. It is also commonly asserted that the riots, which continued on and off for six days, marked the beginning of the gay rights movement. Gay people had founded a political movement for the rights of gay people prior to Stonewall, although of modest means, and it was the Stonewall Riots that resulted in the birth of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and later of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). These exemplars of a new kind of gay organization, imbued with the militant spirit of the riots that engendered them, soon inspired thousands of gay men and lesbians across the country—and ultimately around the world—to join the movement for gay civil and human rights.

The immense changes precipitated by the Stonewall Riots make us want to know more about this event and to understand its causes. Yet the riots have seemed to a large degree inexplicable. Why did a sustained resistance occur when the police raided this particular club? Why did gay men take a stand at that time and at that place?

Research conducted for this history revealed that the riots occurred for a number of reasons having to do with timing, social history, cultural changes, and local history and geography, as well as political events. Moreover, many of these causes were as subtle as they were real and thus have long eluded notice. The factor of time further complicates determining the event’s causes: not only did these causes and contributing factors not occur simultaneously but they were spread out over wide vistas of time, with some of the underlying causes occurring decades prior to the event while others were as fresh as that week’s headlines. How these various strands eventually came together to create a turning point for the gay rights movement is the subject of this history. Given the varied nature of the riots’ causes, their origins at different points in time, and their multiplicity, the way in which these factors converged to create the Stonewall Riots is an intricate story. Yet almost all the causes lay where the riots took place, in America’s bohemia, Greenwich Village.

S  E  T  T  I  N  G

T  H  E

S  T  A  G  E

Greenwich Village, USA

G R E E N W I C H   V I L L A G E

B E F O R E   T H E   S T O N E W A L L   R I O T S:

H I S T O R Y   A N D   T R A D I T I O N S

In the late 1960s, Tony Lauria, known to his friends and associates as Fat Tony, the son of an important Mafioso named Ernie, decided to open a gay bar in Greenwich Village. He did so despite the unhappiness it caused his father, a man so conservative that it was said that meeting with him was almost like having an audience with the pope. Ernie had made his fortune in traditional Mafia operations such as the carting business and felt that running a fag bar was for people on the lower echelons of the Mafia hierarchy. The father had high ambitions for Tony and sent him to Xavier, a Catholic preparatory school. Despite the quality education Tony had received—as shown by his good diction—he preferred to hang out on the street with other neighborhood boys whose thick Italian accents made them sound like actors playing mobsters. The father’s success, his lofty aspirations for his son, and his displeasure at his son’s barroom venture suggest that an archetypal father-son conflict may have been behind Fat Tony’s decision.¹

Fat Tony’s father owned the apartment building on the southwest corner of Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue, in which he and Fat Tony lived. An impressive structure, the proud building towers over its neighbors and displays knights carved in stone on its facade. At seventeen stories it is high enough that its upper floors command a fine view of the neighborhood.

Looking east, Washington Square Park, for many the very epitome of the Village, is just a block away. The popular park has a history hardly suspected by the many New Yorkers who think of it only as a pleasant place to walk, little knowing, for example, that the golden leaves they enjoy strolling through in the fall have grown out of the bodies of other New Yorkers. In the city’s early days, when most of New York’s population still inhabited Manhattan’s southern tip, a marsh covered the park. During the 1798 cholera epidemic the city desperately needed an out-of-town paupers’ graveyard and drained the marsh to meet this exigency. On the northwest corner of Washington Square an extremely tall English elm tree stands only about ten feet from the park’s edge. A straight line drawn west from this tree would practically hit the front of Tony’s father’s building. Some say the tree on the corner is the oldest tree in the entire five boroughs. Oldest or not, the Hanging Elm earned its name when Manhattan established a public gallows and chose it as the site for executions. Perhaps the city chose the tree because of its proximity to the paupers’ graves, which allowed the city authorities to dispatch its least valued citizens without bothering to haul the bodies away. When the graveyard had consumed ten thousand bodies, the poor were not even shown the minimal respect ordinarily granted a final resting place, for the graveyard was converted into a military parade ground. Eventually, the beggars and the criminals had their revenge. When the army brought in their heavy artillery to show it off, the weight proved too much for the decaying bodies to support and the weapons collapsed into the unmarked graves of the poor. After that unexpected defeat, the city turned the site into a park.

To the west of Ernie’s building lay another vista with a compelling past. The street that runs from the Hanging Tree to the front of the mob-owned apartment building intersects Christopher Street just where Fat Tony’s new business was situated—but not before passing the Northern Dispensary, the city’s oldest clinic, where Edgar Allan Poe had been a patient. (Poe would no doubt have appreciated the irony that immediately adjacent to the building where sick people had gone seeking to escape the grave there was once a sausage factory; in recent years, as if inadvertently betraying its ancestry, the ground floor of the same building housed a leather clothing store.)

Fat Tony could hardly have found a street with a more colorful history than Christopher Street for his new business. The oldest and longest street in Greenwich Village, Christopher Street at one time extended beyond its current length to about the middle of what is now West 8th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Where Christopher Street used to begin was the location of the Eighth Street Bookshop, the most influential bookstore in Manhattan for Beat literature. In 1964, when Allen Ginsberg—better known to some for being openly homosexual than for his poetry—returned from his long stay in India, he stayed in a room above the store while looking for a place of his own. It was at the Eighth Street Bookshop that Al Aronowitz, the New York Post reporter who had written some of the first articles on the Beats, dropped by one day with a young folk singer he wanted Ginsberg to meet, namely, Bob Dylan.²

Given Christopher Street’s length and history, it is not surprising that a walk down even a couple of its blocks can provide a sampling of the long Village tradition of bohemian life and its influence across time. In walking from where the Eighth Street Bookshop stood to the Northern Dispensary on Christopher Street, the short physical distance traveled suggests a parallel journey of ideas over a vast expanse of time. Allen Ginsberg found inspiration in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, calling him the first psychedelic poet, making this short tour all the more suggestive, for while 8th Street had the Eighth Street Bookshop as a cutting-edge literary presence in the 1950s, in the late 1960s the street became one of the main purveyors of psychedelic posters and clothes.

Where Christopher Street begins today, at its intersection with Greenwich Avenue, we find the former site of Luke Connor’s, a popular gathering place for the actors and writers of the Provincetown Players, an association of some of the twentieth century’s most important talents in the theater, such as Eugene O’Neill. A few doors in from Greenwich Avenue is 11 Christopher Street, where the influential poet e. e. cummings once lived. Farther down the block, just two doors west of where the Stonewall Inn would open, was the Lion’s Head, a pub popular with writers. This bar offered refuge for creative spirits from playwright Lanford Wilson and composer David Amram to writers James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Frank McCourt. At the end of this block of Christopher Street, at the corner of Seventh Avenue South, The Village Voice’s office was in a building whose jutting triangular shape resembled a ship’s prow, suggesting the forward-looking aspirations of the innovative writers and artists who worked for The Voice; among them, photographer Berenice Abbott, underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas, and poet Frank O’Hara. Through its encouragement of Off Off Broadway theater, The Voice helped to expand the very concept of theater.

In a subtle way, another element of the avant-garde history of these few blocks ties into this history. Just as the Village’s population rose and fell over the decades and centuries, so did its reputation as a bohemian quarter. (It was the Village’s reputation for unconventional lifestyles that first attracted gay people to the area around the turn of the century, as they sensed that a place known for wide tolerance might even accept sexual nonconformists.)³ When both Seventh Avenue and the Seventh Avenue subway line were extended south into the Village, the new easy access led to a rediscovery of the area as a bohemian enclave. This in turn led to a burgeoning of the real bohemian scene and the birth of a tourist-trap imitation one. It was in part because of the propinquity of the new subway station that Sheridan Square, close by Christopher Street, became the epicenter for both kinds of venues. These were composed mainly of clubs and another Village institution, tearooms, which were very modest restaurants that often catered to a particular clientele.

With the onset of Prohibition, artists, intellectuals, and gay men and lesbians began to socialize more and more in tearooms, since bars could no longer serve alcohol. Among the rare early American books to depict lesbian love is the autobiography of Mary Casal, The Stone Wall, published in 1930.⁴ That same year, two former stables at 51 and 53 Christopher Street were merged into one building at the ground-floor level and became Bonnie’s Stone Wall, which soon gained a reputation as one of the more notorious tearooms in the Village, a reputation not easily earned in a time when tearooms were routinely raided by the police. It seems reasonable therefore to assume that in naming her notorious business Bonnie’s Stone Wall, the owner, presumably Bonnie, was alluding to the new memoir to send a coded message to lesbians that they would be welcomed there.⁵ The tearoom’s notoriety does not seem to have harmed business, for Bonnie’s Stone Wall was one of the rare cases of a tearoom that not only survived but also evolved into a full restaurant. Decades later, Bonnie’s Stone Wall had lost its rebellious edge and become a popular place to hold wedding receptions and banquets and had even become a particular favorite of policemen. By the 1940s its name had already changed to the more bucolic-sounding Bonnie’s Stonewall Inn, and by the 1960s it had been changed again to the Stonewall Inn Restaurant. It was the former Stonewall Inn Restaurant that, in 1967, having sat vacant for some time after a fire gutted it, metamorphosed into the gay club the Stonewall Inn. While the staid restaurant’s uproarious origins were quite forgotten by the second half of the twentieth century, it seems as if fate had marked the place from its very beginnings as a site of homosexual rebellion.⁶

Christopher Street’s origins go back to the time when the area that became Greenwich Village seemed remote from Manhattan’s southern end, where the Dutch founded the city. When the Dutch government wanted to reward Wouter Van Twiller, the third director of New Amsterdam, with a farm, he was given two hundred acres of land within the present-day Village, near the Indian settlement known as Sapponckanican.⁷ With the passage of time, the original Dutch farmland was subdivided and resubdivided as the population of farmers slowly grew. The tempo of populating this portion of Manhattan sped up dramatically when a series of four epidemics of yellow fever and cholera struck lower Manhattan between 1791 and 1805.⁸ Early New Yorkers fled to what was then seen as an outpost so distant that they could not imagine a plague following them that far.

These flights from plague eventually transformed the Village from a rural country hamlet into an area so populous that it became necessary to lay down roads. From their earliest days, Villagers have shown a certain appreciation of their own traditions and a willingness to defend them. Perhaps the earliest manifestation of this trait occurred when the first Village roads were planned by the residents who were careful to see that the roads followed the footpaths left by the original Indians as well as those added by the early settlers. A number of the Village’s original streets were therefore laid out because Indians and farmers, with their close ties to the earth, had followed paths that seemed natural to them, so that the Village’s streets were created for the convenience of human feet and not for wheeled vehicles.⁹ When an attempt was made in 1817 to impose a grid plan on all of Manhattan’s streets, the citizens of Greenwich Village successfully resisted the plan and the Village became the only part of Manhattan north of the Wall Street area where the new street plan was not implemented. This resistance shows that the Villagers’ sense of their community as a unique place and their resistance to conformity have deep roots. To understand Villager psychology, this ingredient of feistiness must be factored in. Villagers have long been willing to fight for what they want as well as to applaud those who have the courage to stand up for their beliefs. When the antecedent to the subway trains, elevated trains (the el), were built too close to Village residences, housewives angered by the trains’ loud racket are said to have stacked bricks in their kitchens to throw at the passing trains. Villagers were so proud of a leader of a riot that they named a street for him: Gay Street was named for attorney Sidney Howard Gay, the editor of the Anti-Slavery Standard, to honor him for his role in the 1834 abolition riots.¹⁰

The New York Public Library has a collection of 54,000 photographs of old New York, taken between the 1870s and the 1940s. The first appearance in this collection of the two buildings that would one day become the Stonewall Inn bar is a photograph taken in 1899 that shows two white horses drawing a trolley as they approach 51 and 53 Christopher Street. It is appropriate that a pair of horses are featured in the earliest image of these buildings, since they were both built to serve as stables in an era that relied heavily on animal muscle for transportation. The horses bespeak a period when Americans lived closer to the land, a slower time when people were not so alienated from their own natures or from their fellow beings. Even in bustling Manhattan, businesses took the time to pay attention to the amenities: of these two Christopher Street stables, one was home to the all-black horses that delivered goods for Saks Fifth Avenue, and one of the stable keeper’s duties was to paint the horses’ hooves black to match their coats.¹¹

However, 1899 was also the year that Henry Ford started the Detroit Automobile Company and that New York City got its first fleet of taxicabs. The next image in the library’s collection of these buildings is taken in 1928, and 53 Christopher Street is a French bakery. Number 51 still has The Jefferson Livery Stable emblazoned on its facade, but these words are obscured by a larger poster nailed on top of it proclaiming that the building is about to be altered into most desirable STUDIO APARTMENTS. A clear view of 51 and 53 Christopher Street is blocked by a car and a delivery truck.¹²

While Greenwich Village grew by fits and starts—and had occasional declines—it maintained a certain level of isolation until well into the twentieth century because its irregular street plan impeded a direct flow of traffic into the Village. The increasing popularity of both the automobile and the recently introduced subway system added to the public pressure to extend Seventh Avenue. At the close of World War I, Seventh Avenue, which used to end at 11th Street, was extended south, with its new section named Seventh Avenue South.¹³ The Greenwich Village Historic District Designation Report, which documents 1969 Greenwich Village in detail, states that due to the extension south of both Seventh Avenue and the West Side subway line, the physical isolation of Greenwich Village from the main traffic routes of the City was lost forever.¹⁴ As horses and stables became rarer and rarer, gas stations and automobile supply stores filled up the small triangular plots the cut-through had made along Seventh Avenue South.¹⁵ The triumph of impersonal mechanical speed over a gentler and more natural mode of transportation meant that the last horses at 51 and 53 Christopher Street were evicted, and in 1930 the two buildings became one.

At the west end of the block on which the Stonewall Inn club would later open, a number of streets—Christopher, Seventh Avenue South, West 4th, Sheridan Square, and Grove—crisscross and converge. The resulting effect of a traffic hub in an entertainment district with busy pedestrian traffic has struck more than one observer as a scaled-down version of Times Square. Running underneath the surface of Christopher Street, a PATH commuter train connecting the Village to New Jersey runs at almost a right angle to the Seventh Avenue subway line, dropping off passengers both on lower Christopher Street, close to the Hudson River, and on 9th Street near Sixth Avenue, only about 150 feet from where Christopher Street begins. The Sixth Avenue subway was extended south at the end of the 1920s, and an entrance to the West 4th Street station, with its seven subway lines, is only a little farther away from the Stonewall Inn’s door than the Christopher Street station. All in all, the Stonewall Inn was only a block away from eight subway lines, only about two short blocks away from a PATH train station, and between three major avenues: Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, and Seventh Avenue South. More significantly, the club was only a short city block and a half from Greenwich Avenue, the premier cruising ground for gay men in New York City in the 1960s. Moreover, the new bar was located the same distance from what these men called The Corner, the intersection of Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street, the most popular meeting place for gay men on all of Greenwich Avenue.¹⁶ The new bar could not possibly have been more centrally located.

In addition to the highly centralized location of the Stonewall Inn, its immediate geography also had some unusual features for New York City. First, by Manhattan standards there is an unusual amount of empty space around the Stonewall Inn. Directly in front of the club lies Christopher Park and, just a little to the east of the park, the area around the triangular Northern Dispensary is fairly open, being the intersection of three streets (Grove, Christopher, and Waverly Place). Indeed, The Greenwich Village Historic District Designation Report noted the way the geography of Waverly Place by the Northern Dispensary gives the feeling of openness, so rare in our streets today.¹⁷

That feeling of openness sprang from the Village tradition of citizens standing up to those in power to protect their interests, for Christopher Park had formerly been the site of an awful tenement. When it burned to the ground in a fire that killed more than forty persons, Villagers protested the idea of another residential building being built there and insisted that the land be turned into a park.

Other events in the history of the immediate area surrounding the small park demonstrate the Village’s long history of open-spiritedness. Near the base of the triangle formed by Christopher Park is 59 Grove Street, where Thomas Paine died. Paine’s pamphlets played such a vital role in starting the American Revolution that Thomas Jefferson praised him as the only American who could write better than himself, and William Blake put him in a class with Jesus as a worker of miracles for overthrowing all the armies of Europe with a small pamphlet. In spite of these accolades, Paine was so unconventional as a freethinker that he often ended up in trouble. After he went to France to support the French Revolution, he was imprisoned. When New York State gave him a free home in New Rochelle to honor him for his role in the American Revolution, his unconventional beliefs so outraged his conservative neighbors that they tried to kill him several times.¹⁸ At the end of his life when he needed a refuge, the Village provided it.

On the south side of Christopher Park, directly across from the buildings that became the Stonewall Inn, was the home of Phillip Stokes. Stokes had a great interest in Eastern mysticism, and so, in 1932, he invited the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba to stay in his home. It was there that Meher Baba first met the American public. He had been observing silence since 1925, communicating by means of a small board he carried on which the letters of the alphabet were painted. At the gathering at the Stokes home, Meher Baba pointed to the letters on the board to spell out his message, saying that he was observing silence only so that he could one day break it, which he said would bring about a spiritual upheaval: America has tremendous energy, but most of this energy is misdirected. I intend to divert it into spiritual and creative channels. Asked how his speaking would help such current social problems as those of politics, economics, and sex, he answered that when he spoke the results would be gradual and would affect all aspects of life. New values and significance will be attached to matters which appear to baffle solution at the present moment, he asserted. He later explained that constructive and creative forces were being released that, although working silently, would bring about the transformation of man.¹⁹ Harbingers of radical change—artistic, political, and spiritual—surrounded the diminutive triangular park.

At the west end of the block where Stonewall was located, there is a confusion of street names: Seventh Avenue South is generally called Seventh Avenue, and Sheridan Square—shaped like a triangle in spite of its name—is commonly referred to as West 4th Street, while everyone calls the park across the street from the Stonewall Inn Sheridan Square, even though its official designation is Christopher Park. That a statue of General Philip Sheridan looks out over Christopher Park—and not Sheridan Square—may have caused the confusion, whereas the statue of a Civil War general opposite an establishment named Stonewall caused at least one person to assume that the statue represented Stonewall Jackson.

The several one-way streets intersecting around Christopher Park confuse even Village residents. Someone sitting in Christopher Park, facing west and surveying the corner lampposts on the park’s western end, will see that some of the lampposts have two signs, each saying ONE WAY. Because of the oblique angles at which streets intersect there, the one-way signs seem to point in opposite directions. The way streets come together into a hub here results directly from the extension of Seventh Avenue farther south. When the extension was created, it cut through the existing crazy-quilt pattern, created a century earlier when the Villagers fended off the imposition of the grid plan. With the quilt being cut again, its pattern became even crazier around the sheared-off edges, and nowhere more so than around Christopher Street, where a person standing today can see the almost surrealistic shape of some buildings sliced apart by what Villagers referred to with dread as the cut-through.

The east end of Christopher Park can be just as confusing. There Waverly Place achieves the distinction that makes it unique among all the streets of New York City: the only street in the city to wrap around itself, it does so where it crosses Christopher Street, throwing itself around the three-sided Northern Dispensary (as a New Yorker once put it, Where Waverly intersects Waverly intersecting Waverly). From this point, as if having succeeded in confusing itself, Waverly takes a sudden sharp bend like the irregular path of a drunk and continues east to Sixth Avenue. But not before running into Gay Street on its northern side, a surprisingly short street that in its own diminutive existence of one block cannot keep itself straight, veering back upon itself at an odd angle, only to turn back into Christopher Street.

Christopher Street became so gay in the 1970s that some gay men wrongly assumed that Gay Street had been named in their honor. Still, from a turn-of-the-century perspective, this confused knot of streets could certainly be termed, however anachronistically, a queer geography. It was in the midst of this tangle of irregular streets and triangular open spaces that the largest gay club of the 1960s opened.

To comprehend the club’s significance, however, it is first necessary to understand the various social and political forces that were shaping the specific features of the homosexual world that the Stonewall Inn would inhabit. Some of these forces were national, and many of them were specific to New York City. These factors provide the context that explains why the Stonewall Inn became a special place for gay men in general and for particular subsets of the gay population in particular. A survey of the legal situation of homosexual men and women in the United States and particularly New York City in the 1950s and 1960s will provide a framework to understand the dynamics at work in both the local gay population as well as the history of gay political organizations in New York City. The successes and failures of gay political activism did much to influence the reception and fate of the Stonewall Inn—and even influenced the kind of club it would be.²⁰

T H E   L A W

The homosexual is an inveterate seducer of the youth of both sexes, and… is not content with being degenerate himself; he must have degenerate companions, and is ever seeking younger victims.… Some male sex deviants do not stop with infecting their often-innocent partners [with homosexuality]: they descend through perversions to other forms of depravity, such as drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder. Once a man assumes the role of homosexual, he throws off all moral restraints.

—Coronet, 1950²¹

This history is one in which almost all the action takes place in the 1960s. The phrase the sixties inevitably brings to mind images of freedom and rapid social and political change. The irony is that for almost the entirety of that decade homosexual men and women, far from experiencing a great burst of freedom, found themselves in the worst legal position they had been in since the republic’s birth.

Because of a Puritan heritage, America’s laws had traditionally oppressed those who engaged in same-sex lovemaking. With the increasing shrillness of the far right after World War II, exemplified by both a rabid anticommunism and the demand for total conformity that characterized the 1950s, laws aimed at homosexuals became so harsh that at times they were draconian.

The Defense Department hardened its policy of excluding homosexual servicemen and -women, tripling the World War II discharge rate and, in a reversal of prior practice, generally giving less-than-honorable blue discharges. These punitive discharges stripped thousands of veterans of the benefits that had been promised them in the GI Bill of Rights. After Lt. Roy Blick of the Washington, D.C., vice squad testified before the Senate in 1950 that 5,000 homosexuals worked for the government (a figure he had invented), the Senate authorized a full investigation into the matter by a subcommittee chaired by North Carolina senator Clyde Hoey.²² The Hoey subcommittee’s report said that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons. Having concluded that one homosexual can pollute an entire office, the subcommittee urged that the military’s recent purge of homosexuals be the model for civilian agencies.

The Civil Service Commission and the FBI complied by initiating an intense campaign to ferret out homosexuals by, for instance, correlating morals arrests across the United States with lists of government employees and checking fingerprints of job applicants against the FBI’s fingerprint files.

After Eisenhower became president, he signed Executive Order 10450, in April 1953, which added sexual perversion as a ground for government investigation and dismissal. The government shared police and military records with private employers, resulting in the dismissal of hundreds.

While McCarthyism encouraged the toughening of laws toward homosexuals because they were believed to be security risks, America’s Puritan tradition was producing hysteria over child molestation. Homosexuals were believed to be the main culprits. As the right-wing demonization of homosexuals proceeded apace, the negative qualities attributed to them overlapped until it became a common assumption that any homosexual man or woman was so beyond the pale that he or she must also partake of the most forbidden ideological fruit of all: communism. Homosexuals thus became handy scapegoats for both of these postwar obsessions. Antihomosexual laws were correspondingly made more severe.

States passed new laws that either stiffened the penalties for homosexual sex or created new categories to criminalize. For example, California governor Earl Warren thought the sex offender problem so serious that in 1949 he convened a special session of the state legislature to deal with the issue. That session passed laws that increased the penalties for sodomy and invented a new crime: loitering in a public toilet. The name of anyone convicted of spending too much time in a toilet was registered with the state. Twenty-nine states enacted new sexual psychopath laws and/or revised existing ones, and homosexuals were commonly the laws’ primary targets. In almost all states, professional licenses could be revoked or denied on the basis of homosexuality, so that professionals could lose their livelihoods.

By 1961 the laws in America were harsher on homosexuals than those in Cuba, Russia, or East Germany, countries that the United States criticized for their despotic ways. An adult convicted of the crime of having sex with another consenting adult in the privacy of his or her home could get anywhere from a light fine to five, ten, or twenty years—or even life—in prison. In 1971 twenty states had sex psychopath laws that permitted the detaining of homosexuals for that reason alone. In Pennsylvania and California sex offenders could be locked in a mental institution for life, and in seven states they could be castrated.²³ At California’s Atascadero State Hospital, known soon after its opening as Dachau for Queers, men convicted of consensual sodomy were, as authorized by a 1941 law, given electrical and pharmacological shock therapy, castrated, and lobotomized. Gay Law author William N. Eskridge Jr. summed up the legal status of homosexuals at the beginning of the 1960s: The homosexual… was smothered by law.²⁴

Nor were transvestites spared. In New York State an old antilabor statute, passed in the nineteenth century to suppress tenant farmers who donned disguises to demonstrate against their landlords, was dusted off to use against men and women who dressed in the clothes of the opposite sex. In practice, New York police used the guideline that any person wearing fewer than three articles of clothing appropriate to their sex was, according to subsection 4 of section 240.35 of the New York Penal Code, masked… by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration and thus subject to arrest.²⁵

It has often been pointed out that no specific statute outlawed being homosexual, that only homosexual acts were illegal. While this is technically true, the effect of the entire body of laws and policies that the state employed to police the conduct of homosexual men and women was to make being gay de facto a crime. The very harshness of the laws made judges generally unwilling to sentence homosexual men, lesbians, and transvestites to such inhumane punishment. Instead, judges tended to hand out light fines or to place those convicted on probation. But the random or selective use of far harsher penalties and the potential threat of their use, combined with other sanctions and harassments, major and minor, official and nonofficial, more than sufficed to keep the vast majority of homosexual men and women well within the lines that society had drawn for them. Thus lesbians and homosexual men lived in an uneasy state of fear and spiritual suffocation.

Once all manner of sanctions had been created to make it difficult for homosexual men and women to meet their own kind, the police aggressively patrolled the few places where homosexuals could mingle: bars and bathhouses (both private and public) and outdoor cruising places such as streets, parks, and beaches. Agents planted microphones in park benches and used peepholes and two-way mirrors to spy on homosexuals in public rest rooms.²⁶

While the law classified homosexuals as criminals and the scientific establishment used psychology to medicalize homosexuality into an illness, gay men and lesbians found almost universal moral condemnation from religions, whether mainstream or obscure. Thrice condemned—as criminals, as mentally ill, and as sinners—homosexuals faced a social reality in post–World War II America that was bleak, if not grim.

Doric Wilson had come to New York in 1958 from Washington State to pursue a career as a playwright and often came to the Village to meet other gay men. One Sunday he circled a block on Greenwich Avenue. He had circled the block twice already and hadn’t met anyone. In the early sixties it could be hard to meet someone, the encounter was so ritualized. The shops were closed on Sundays, but he circled the block looking at the shop windows; then he walked by without looking. Then he went around the block again, passed an attractive man, and stood and feigned a studious interest in the goods displayed in the window. Would the good-looking fellow stop and also stare? Maybe the other man would signal his interest by tapping his foot as they both window-shopped. Then Doric could ask the other man if he knew the time or had a light for a cigarette? They started the long, drawn-out procedure of approach. Did he live here? What did he think of the Village? And so forth. Suddenly Doric felt a sharp pain in his back. The blow was accompanied by a command: Move on, faggots! Move on! Doric didn’t bother to argue with the police officer. He just moved on.

One reason Edgar Allan Poe went to the Northern Dispensary was because it was practically next to the small row house where he had found a very inexpensive apartment. The house where Poe lived happens to be across the street from the building Fat Tony’s father owned. Barry Miles wrote that American bohemianism is said to have started with Edgar Allan Poe,²⁷ and the incongruous juxtaposition of the mobster’s large apartment building with the bohemian’s small row house in some ways parallels the paradox in which gay New Yorkers in the 1960s found themselves trapped. As word increasingly got out nationwide that there were large numbers of gay people in Greenwich Village, more and more gay men and lesbians were drawn to New York City. Eventually New York had the largest gay population in the United States, and the Village increasingly served as a center for the growing homosexual subculture. Sociologists Martin Weinberg and Colin Williams, who studied New York’s homosexual population in the late 1960s, wrote that they found twenty-six bars, twelve nightclub/restaurants, four hotels, and two private clubs that catered to homosexuals, as well as all five of the city’s lesbian bars, in the Greenwich Village area. They added: Cruising areas abound.²⁸

Paradoxically, New York was also the city that most aggressively and systematically targeted gay men as criminals. George Chauncey’s Gay New York traces the rise of a visible gay population in the city from the 1890s to 1940, as well as the rise of powerful antivice societies to combat prostitution, alcohol consumption, homosexuality, and other behavior viewed as immoral.²⁹ In response to the great influence that these societies exerted over politicians, police vice squads—which New York City was the first to create—attempted to control homosexuals by observing locales where they congregated, using decoys to entice them, and raiding gay bars and baths.³⁰

When Prohibition ended in 1933, the state passed many laws to regulate the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. As the word Authority in its name suggests, the laws that created the State Liquor Authority (SLA) made it undemocratic, giving it practically total leeway in administering and enforcing these laws. The SLA interpreted the laws so that even the presence of homosexuals—categorized as people who were lewd and dissolute—in a bar made that place disorderly and subject to closure.³¹ The result made New York City the most vigorous investigator of homosexuals before World War II.³² Responding to right-wing pressure after the war, New York City modernized its stakeout, decoy, and police raid operations, and continued to haul in thousands of homosexuals, sometimes just for socializing at a private party. More commonly, the police arrested gay men at bars and in cruising areas. By 1966 over one hundred men were arrested each week for homosexual solicitation as a result of police entrapment.³³

Making it illegal for bars to serve homosexuals created a situation that could only attract organized crime. The Mafia entered into the vacuum to run gay bars, which in turn set up a scenario for police corruption and the exploitation of the bars’ customers. These victims were not likely to complain, because they had nowhere else to go and because they feared the mob. Moreover, the involvement of the Mafia in gay clubs further increased the legal vulnerability of gay men and lesbians.

In the mid-1960s—the very time when a wave of freedom, openness, and demand for change was cresting—New York City increased its enforcement of antihomosexual laws to such an extent that it amounted to an attempt to impose police-state conditions onto a homosexual ghetto.

R E S I S T A N C E

Throughout much of American history lesbians, homosexual men, and transvestites at times offered resistance—however weak, fleeting, or ineffectual—to the social and legal institutions that oppressed them. The first sustainable political resistance began in 1950 in Los Angeles when Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society. This marked the birth of the homophile movement. The founders of the Mattachine Society used the word homophile because they believed that this new term, with its incorporation of the Greek word for love, could help counter the stereotype of homosexuals as obsessed with sex. The Mattachine Society took its name from medieval societies in which those playing the role of fool could speak truth to those in power.

Hay and his colleagues articulated in a statement of purpose a plan of action in which homosexuals who lived isolated from their own kind were, first, unified and then educated in order to develop an ethical homosexual culture similar to that of other minorities. After progress had been made toward the first two goals, the intent was to push forward into the realm of political action. The Mattachine Society began taking political action sooner than planned when a police officer entrapped one of its founders. The new organization resolved to